


oblivion calls out your name

by CaptainAmelia22



Category: Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Peggy Carter is the Winter Soldier
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-08
Updated: 2014-02-08
Packaged: 2018-01-11 13:45:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,982
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1173776
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CaptainAmelia22/pseuds/CaptainAmelia22
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She is the Winter Soldier.  She is a ghost, a forgotten memory of a long-lost past and as such she is broken.</p><p>He tries to save her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	oblivion calls out your name

She woke to darkness.  And pain.  

Somehow it was familiar to her.  

“ _Welcome back Winter Soldier_ _,_ ” the man with blue eyes and gray in his black hair said as her eyes fluttered open and her heart surged back into life in her chest.  

She did not question the Russian spilling from his lips or the gold sickle and hammer on his chest.  This was just something that was familiar to her.  

Something…normal.  

“ _What is my mission, comrade Karpov?”_  she asks as he shines a light in her eyes and tests her reflexes with a metal hammer he wields almost absently; he does not unstrap her from her coffin-they never do anymore, not after the first time when she killed five of their men on pure instinct.  She still remembers their blood splashing on her face, warm and coppery.  But she lets him touch her, even though it makes a part of her uncomfortable and she closes her eyes to the strangeness in her head.

Half-forgotten memories wash through her mind and she lets her head fall forward so her dirty brown hair can cover her face-can hide the fear she always seems to feel when she wakes in her glass coffin.  

She does not fear the men who speak Russian to her these days, lets them do as they please; she lets them poke and prod and adjust her body just so.  They are familiar to her-shadowy counterparts to her sanity and they are expected.

The memories…

The memories are something else entirely.

She is afraid of the memories.

Of the person lurking there that reminds her a little of herself.  Sometimes she wonders what her face looks like, if it is heart-shaped and slightly tan from too much Italian sunlight.  Sometimes she wonders if her eyes are brown.

Like the woman’s she sometimes remembers in a half-dream.

But the men-she remembers them clearly.  Far more clearly than the woman in the scarlet dress and deep red lips.  

She remembers the man-a blonde man with blue eyes and a silver star on his chest smiling down at her.

There is love in his eyes.

She remembers a dark haired man with a mustache and goatee, a smug smile on his face as he dangles a piece of bread, coated in melted cheese over his mouth.

There is humor in his eyes and maybe a little love too.

She remembers another dark haired man-this one clean shaven-but with eyes dark with haunted memories that she will never understand.

Unless…she does.

He scares her.

But she loves him.  

The man with the pale blue eyes and the red sigil on his chest helps her from her coffin, steadying her as her limbs adjust to the sudden movements she makes and she does not pay any attention to his absent mumblings as he leads her from her quarters to his work station.

There is a chair there, waiting for her.  She does not understand the chair but she knows, if she sits in it, that the mission will come.

And she lives for a mission.

For a chance to prove herself.

For a chance to live once more.  

She is led to the chair and to the one part of herself she does not understand.

The one part of her that will never be familiar.

She never realizes her actual arm is gone-that her shoulder ends in a metal hub and not bone-until she spots her chair and the silver arm resting on the table beside it.

It is delicate-built elegantly as is only appropriate for a female agent of the Red Room-but it is not hers.  

It is deadly and it is heavy.

And it pulls on her-reminding her that-that-something is broken in her mind.

Broken in her body.

“ _Not that_ ,” she whispers weakly every single time her man with the blue eyes and red sigil leads her to the chair and every single time he forces her bodily into the seat and straps her down.

“ _All will be well my Winter Soldier,_ ” he murmurs as he buckles her arm and legs in place and settles the cap over her dirty hair.  “ _You will see.  There is a very important mission waiting for you.”_

And every single time she stares at the arm with it’s red star on the curved metal bicep and the smoothly welded junctures in the joint and she tries to remember.

Tries to remember her name.  

She never remembers in time though and when her eyes open next there is only the mission.

And the arm, the cool metal sighing in the silence of her blue eyed man’s office, is as much a part of her as the cool Russian spilling and teeming through her mind.

Gone are the memories of the three men who she thinks may have loved her, once upon a time.

Gone is the woman in the red dress and the red lips that look like hers.  

Gone is the taste of sanity in the back of her mouth.

Instead…

“ _What is your name?”_  he asks as he fixes the mask to her cheeks and adjusts the holster at her hip.  His blue eyes are cold, blank and absolutely comforting in their bleakness.

She smiles dangerously at him, a tiny curve of full lips a hero once kissed, and she cocks her head at him as she purrs, “ _The Winter Soldier, comrade.”_

“ _And what is your mission?_ _”_  he asks as she flexes her arm and shifts in her heavy boots.  

The smile is gone at that point and her voice follows her as she fades into the shadows of a bitter Russian winter, “ _To kill Captain America.”_

It is the only mission that matters.

And she will complete it.

At any cost.  

* * *

 

There’s a statue commemorating the Howling Commandos and their Captain in Arlington.  

He makes a point of visiting it every time he’s in D.C.

She finds him there one night, after they’ve been deployed to rescue the president and his cabinet from a masked psychopath currently going unclaimed by the usual villains they are used to fighting. Most of the team has already been air-vacced out of the smoking city-except for them.  

He’s in plain clothes, like she herself is, and the only sign that he is her Captain is the shield resting at his feet.  It’s scarred surface is dented.  

She never thought that would have been possible.  

Stark will undoubtedly have a field day with it-analyzing and questioning to the point where the Captain finally snaps.  

She silently vows to herself that she’ll do anything to keep Stark out of the way.

Anything.  

Sirens blare in the background and she can almost imagine the sounds of women crying and children screaming once more.  It’s a sound she wishes she were not so familiar with.  

A president is dead, along with most of his successors.  

She wishes that were something she was not so familiar with, as well.

She wishes the blame wouldn’t be shouldered by the man standing silently in front of her.

“Steve,” she says gently, her cool voice calm and loving.  “The Quinjet is here.”  

She doesn’t mention the blonde agent sitting in the cockpit waiting for them, her white uniform glowing in the gloom surrounding Arlington. Nor does she mention the coffins sitting in state in the White House.  

Even though there isn’t much left to fill them.

The winter wind whips around their still figures, rippling his dark greatcoat and ruffling her auburn hair but neither notices it.

Cold is something both are used to.

Cold has become a comfort to Captain America and the Black Widow.

“If I’d had Bucky here I could have saved them.”

His voice is brittle, broken.

If she knew better she’d say he was well on his way to being trashed.

Maybe it would be better for them both if he was.  

She hesitates and then rests her hand gently on his shoulder.  “Steve, it’s not your fault.  You couldn’t have known the assassin was like-like-”

Us.

The word hangs in the chill air between them and she can’t finish the sentence. It’s too impossible to believe that they’ve…

Failed.

At the hands of another super soldier.  

He’ll go to the funerals.  He’ll have words to say.  Apologies to make.  He’ll go in the uniform, the shield strapped to his back, and nothing the team or Fury has to say will stop him.  

This is Captain America.

He’s supposed to be a hero.  He’s not supposed to fail.  He’s supposed to save the day.

How were they supposed to know the day was already doomed, before they got deployed to the capitol?

“It’s my fault Natasha,” he growls as snow starts blowing and the wind bites brutally at their cheeks.  His blue eyes are dazed-blank-and his blonde hair tumbles over his forehead.  He looks almost as if he’s falling apart at the seams and her fingers clench in response to the pain she sees in him.  He doesn’t look at her, he just continues staring at the names engraved in weathered bronze before him.  “I failed the president.  I failed the team.  Clint-Carol-I…God.”  

He doesn’t twist free of her fingers, doesn’t fight her touch, her silent comfort and grief.  He simply stands with his head bowed and his gloved fingers resting on the plaque commemorating him and his best friend, long dead.  

“It’s all my fault.”  

His words whisper around them, lost to the wind and the snow and stone faced statues smiling lovingly above them.  

And Natasha Romanoff can’t seem to find the words to fix this.  

She’s not made for comfort-not made for soothing words and gentle love.  She’s hard.  She’s cold.  She’s Russian.  

She has no words to say to her friend and leader.

Except, “I’m sorry Steve.”  

Finally his eyes drift up to meet hers and as the stone versions of Captain America and his best friend gaze across Arlington Cemetery in watchful, stony protection, he chokes out the only words that will damn them.  

“How can Peggy still be alive?”

She doesn’t have the words to fix that either so she rests her palm gently on his cheek and tries to keep sane for the both of them.

* * *

 

Captain America is bigger in reality than she had ever thought possible.  

Even kneeling, his head comes to her clavicles.

It’s taken her hours to break him.  She failed in the American’s capitol to kill their cowled hero-her trap worked maybe a little too well-the finalized fatalities count was announced three days after the attack and it is possibly her best.  Ninety dead, including most of the top leaders of the American government with no clear succession in sight.  Her masters will be pleased.

But the hero.  

He came for her-twice now-with his team of masked and powered heroes at his back and failed to stop her.  Just as she failed to stop him.  He slipped through her fingers in Washington before she could put a bullet in his skull and for that she should be ashamed.  But it does not matter in the end.

Here he is, the Great Hero.  The Star-Spangled Avenger.  The Trophy of American Science.

Half-dead.

She always wins, in the end.  

That is all that matters.

The ending of a legend.  The death of a god.  

Her bullet in his skull.  

“Peggy, please, listen to me,” he chokes as he finally falls to his knees on the crumbled cement floor of the abandoned warehouse he followed her to-her final trap.  Blood pools under his massive body from the hundreds of cuts and lacerations she’s given him but she knows it doesn’t matter.

Given an hour and he could walk away from this, completely healed.

She won’t give him even five minutes.

“Peggy, this isn’t you.”  His voice is full of pain and loss but she does not think it is because of the blood leaking from his broken body.  “I’m sorry I failed you,” he whispers and his voice echoes all around her, through the shadows of this hell-hole she brought him to.  “Peggy…”

He does not beg for his life.

He does not plead.

He simply…says that name, the one she does not recognize but that makes her heart race and her shoulder ache and the blood pound fiercely behind her ears.

That name…

Whose is it?

“ _Zatknis_ ,” she finally snarls as she lifts the shield from the shadows at the far edges of the long-forgotten warehouse and pulls her pistol from her holster, to point directly between his eyes.  “ _Vy ne dostoyny_ ,” she whispers as she places her finger on the trigger and prepares to finish this mission once and for all.

_You are not worthy._

But he is Captain America.  

He is a god.

Worthy is the only word that can describe him.

She doesn’t pull the trigger; the blood pounds in her head, rushes desperately through her coiled body, and the mission-the mission is all that matters.  But her finger remains frozen on the trigger.  “ _Zatknis_ ,” she whispers once more, to the tiny voice in the back of her head, telling her to run.  To fade into the shadows and leave the hero to breathe freely once more.  

She watches him carefully as her vision tunnels and a fierce humming fills her ears.

And still, she does not pull the trigger.

Finally he raises his head enough to look at her.

Blue eyes, bluer than even her handler’s, meet hers around the torn edges of his raggedy cowl and she stills at the expression she sees in their shadowed depths.  His face, bloodied and bruised from the brutal pounding she’s given him, stiffens as she presses her gun tighter to his forehead, but that look in his eyes never leaves.

He’s fought her, desperately, for hours with that same look in his eyes and even now, as he breaks before her, it never leaves him.

She hesitates and the cool metal fingers of her left hand flex along the edges of the shield she holds too tightly against her side.  The gun never wavers, even as she hesitates and the words-once clear and concise in the back of her skull-jumble and disintegrate but still she does not kill Captain America.

It’s the expression on his face, the pain in every line of his hulking body, the agonized breaths he takes as his ribs and sternum slowly knit themselves back together thanks to the dangerously powerful chemicals running rampant through his body, that almost stop her finger.

But it’s the look in his eyes that makes her hesitate and forget what her mission is.

Kill Captain America.

How.  

How can she do that?

When he looks at her like this?

Like…

He…

“Peggy, please,” he whispers through the blood welling in the back of his throat and the cold wind whistling through the open eaves above them.  “Please, just do it.”  

Her finger tightens.

The metal of his shield cries out as her fingers clench tighter.

She hesitates.

“Who the hell is Peggy?” she snarls, in perfect English.  

Her finger loosens.

His lips twitch.

Words fall to chaos in the back of her skull.

And he whispers the only thing that breaks her.  

“I love you Margaret Carter.”  

Her finger tightens too quickly for her to stop, all reflex and fulfilled commands and her mind explodes in light and pain, that mimics the blast from her gun.

“No,” she whispers as the weapon falls from nerveless fingers and she grips her skull in agony.  Words, foreign and hateful, ricochet through her mind but she sees nothing but bursts of light and shadows and blue-blue eyes, full of love and sorrow.  “Not this.”

Steve’s eyes.

Blue.

Pained.

Loving.

Dead.

“No,” she screams as she falls to her knees and the metal fingers of the hated left arm tighten against her skull.  “Please.  Let me sleep.”  

Something snaps and suddenly everything is silence and she sobs as she crumples upon bloody graveled cement, with the taste of a bitterly cold Alpine river welling in the back of her throat.  

Darkness, familiar and pain-filled, at long last, takes her.

* * *

 

She dreams she kills Captain America.  

She dreams she places a brutal looking pistol to his forehead and as he chokes out her name through blood-stained lips, she pulls the trigger.

She dreams of shadows and pain and men with hard hands and even harder words that she only barely understands.  

She dreams that death is cold metal in her shoulder and blank spaces full of nothing but darkness.

She dreams.

Of Hell.  

_You killed Captain America, Margaret…_

_Who is Margaret?_

* * *

 

Natasha tells him the story of the Winter Soldier while he comes back to life.  

It starts simply, the story, and as his body slowly heals itself from yet another close-call with death, he tries to keep the nightmares at bay.  

“I don’t know how they found her,” Natasha says one day from the window seat of his hospital room.  He glances at her in surprise-they’ve been silent for hours now, listening to the machines keeping him breathing beep and sigh-and his eyebrow rises carefully.

It’s the only emotion he can express without wincing.  

She smiles slightly at the confusion in his gaze and tucks some hair behind her ear.  Her green eyes grow distant as she leans back against the pillow she stole from him the moment she arrived to check-up on him that morning and she’s silent.  

Steve waits.

All he does is wait anymore.

For a release from Medical.

For clearance from SHIELD.

For word on Peggy-the Winter Soldier.  

For…the world to go back to rights.

He knows he’ll be waiting a very long time.  For all of these.

“I was a child when they brought me to the Red Room,” she says, her voice soft, musing and just a trace of an accent colors her words.  Steve doesn’t mention it.  She continues her story without noticing him or the sun-filled room they lounge in.  She’s long-lost, lost to a shadowed past he will never understand entirely.  And never hopes to understand.  “But the woman they called the Winter Soldier was anything but a child.  She was a teacher, the teacher.  She broke us-the children the leaders deemed worthy for the Red Room’s machinations.  She was brutal and cold and forever the greatest pet of our masters.”

Natasha laughs at this, bitterly, and Steve shudders at the pain he hears in her voice.  Her green eyes close and she folds into herself a little tighter.  It is something he recognizes and understands.

The pain.

The guilt.

The anger.

They work so hard at being good but sometimes…

Sometimes the world works too hard at breaking them all.  

“She taught us how to be cruel, she taught us how to kill without mercy,” Natasha says and Steve can see Peggy in his mind eye-the Peggy he grew to love. She taught him how to be a soldier.  But she had always done so patiently, kindly.

She had been so wholly good in 1943.

But it was far too easy to imagine those brown almond shaped eyes going blank with dispassion and hatred.

He’d seen it for himself just days before.  

Nightmares upon nightmares…

“When I came to the Red Room, I’d already proved myself a merciless person,” she continued, that bare accent still in her words and her eyes blank, empty, devoid of any humanity.  

He wished she would let him hold her.  

“But she broke me anyway.  Sometimes, when I went to sleep at night, I wondered if she did it as revenge to the American’s.  We knew some of her history, you see.”  Natasha glanced at him in time to see him pale and wince.  “We knew her companions, her compatriots, had betrayed her.  Had left her behind.  We knew Captain America had let her fall to her death so Mother Russia could raise her up and save her.”  

The bitterness in her voice was only a third of the shame he felt.

He still remembered Peggy’s fingers slipping through his-still remembered her breathless voice screaming his name as her boots slid through ice and gravel, desperate for purchase.  He still remembered Schmidt laughing behind him, telling him now was the time for choices.  

 _The great Captain will not let those who love him down, will he?_  the Red Skull had crowed as Bucky choked in his grasp and Peggy’s glove started to slip off her fingers.   _Choose, Captain.  Who do you love more?  The boy or the girl?  Who is more worthy of the Captain?  Her or him?_

Steve’s hand clenches tightly in the present, far tighter than it clenched in the past and his eyes stIng as he remembered those almond shaped eyes locking on his and that bow-shaped mouth curling up in a bittersweet smile.

_Goodbye Steve._

“I loved her,” Natasha bites out and Steve’s eyes fly open in surprise at this confession.  It surprises him because Natasha…Natasha has always been the Black Widow.  

Has always been so…Russian.

Something as human as love never seemed to fit her, in his mind’s eye.  Despite the string of lovers she has taken over the years, some of whom were team-members or fellow operatives.

Even they, once upon a time, shared a few nights together.  Mostly out of a joint need of comfort. An escape from guilt and grief.  

Comfort.  Warmth.

Saftety.

He wonders if Sharon knows any of this story.  

“Natasha, I-” he begins to say, his voice rough with disuse and the feeding tube they’d forced down his throat during the coma the medics had kept him under for the first few days after the Winter Soldier had shot him.  

She silences him with a glance and continues her story.

Finishes her story.

Breaks him with her story.

“She was a ghost in the old days, nothing but a blank slate for the directors of Department X to write upon.  That was the whole point of the Winter Soldier program.  She was broken when they pulled her free of that river and she won’t ever break free of their clutches.”  Natasha falls silent for a moment, her bitter words echoing around them for a moment and her hands are tight around the pillow which she clutches in her lap now.  Her red hair curtains her face, hides her eyes from his but he knows her better than most.  He can see the pain in every line of her body.  Can see the guilt and regret.  

“Your Peggy won’t exist anymore Steve,” she murmurs as the shadows lengthen and his body takes on a dull ache that radiates from the base of his skull down to his chest.  “She may regain some of her old memories, but she won’t be the same Peggy Carter you fought the War with.  She’s broken now.  A relic.  A fossil of a long lost era and you’re going to have to keep that in mind when you see her.”  

Steve has nothing to say to that, because he knows what she says is true.  

Because in the end, Natasha is always the practical one.

* * *

 

She wakes to darkness.  

Darkness and pain.  

She wishes both things were not so familiar to her.  

“Hello Peggy.”

It’s the voice,  _his_  voice, saying that name again-the one that scares her and makes her heart hammer-that finally forces her to ignore the pain.

She stills as he comes into her line of sight and suddenly the darkness is not so dark any longer and the silence surrounding her, not so deep.

She struggles to remember who she is.

What her name is.

What this man means to her.

But in the end…

All she can do is breathe and close her eyes as a blue light touches her face and the faint sound of bionic metal hums.  

“ _Hello Captain America."_


End file.
